by Beth Richards
The drive down Florida State Highway 19 is typical west-central, formerly small-town Florida: a flat four-lane, divided highway with stoplights synchronized to match the speed limit—which no one follows. Every 1,000 feet or so, a lane graciously sashays left, allowing travelers to cross the divider to access a condo complex or fast-food joint or convenience store with barred windows and bins of expired Twinkies. Some buildings retain their original 1950s steel-and-neon flair, but most have been renovated to Florida archetypal: cement-block-stucco topped with scalloping red tiles. Sprawling golf courses feature glare-white sand traps and sun-red golfers.
It’s Florida and October. My windows are down. Pleasantly warm, agreeably humid air riffles in. Somewhere nearby I hear the thunk-thunk of a pile driver, pounding thick stakes into the sandy soil, so that the new buildings don’t sink into the eggshell subsurface that is the Florida peninsula. I am so busy thinking about the number of piles needed to hold up each outcrop of new construction that I almost miss my turn: 6131 Commercial Way. Weeki Wachee State Park officially resides in Spring Hill, Hernando County, but the Florida State Parks department lists the location as “Weeki Wachee, Florida.”
I quickly turn—sorry/not sorry to the profoundly-tanned lady in the SUV nudging my rental car bumper—into the park’s vast lot. This is pre-Covid. Although it is a coolish day by Florida standards, and early morning, the blacktop is already absorbing the sun’s relentless rays. A light breeze stirs the air, which rises and shimmers in languorous waves. Like mermaids.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I am a northwest Florida native, born in the Panhandle and raised on family road trips to Florida’s magnificent freshwater springs. We had our very own spring on the northernmost acres of the farmland that my parents and grandparents shared, but it wasn’t big enough for swimming—likely a magnitude 8 or less. Instead, on scorching summer days, after chores were done, we drove 15 miles to the Blue Hole. Some weekends, we camped on the shores of spring fed Compass and Crystal lakes. On one family vacation we visited both Wakulla and Silver Springs, the two springs that even someone not from Florida might know of. What these water lands have in common is the Floridan Aquifer, a 100,000 square mile underground water reservoir that begins in South Carolina and extends past central Florida. Just so you know: B.D. (before Disney) and before the Army Corps of Engineers built a whole bunch of drainage canals, central Florida was the southern border of the Floridan Aquifer and the northern boundary of the Everglades.
Even though I’ve visited many of Florida’s thirty-three first-magnitude springs during my lifetime, I’ve never, ever been to Weeki Wachee. Until now. My parents wouldn’t have said, “It’s too touristy,” but clearly they preferred the less-developed spots. The Blue Hole Spring is deep bowl of water that remains around 70 degrees year-round—providing a brisk contrast to the near-100-degree heat of a northwest Florida summer. When we swam there, the “amenities” consisted of a dirt road and a couple of picnic tables. Wakulla was a little more developed, though there was no stuffed alligator or gift shop.
I have no clear memory of our family visit to Silver Springs, though I’m sure we would have ridden the glass-bottom boats, and my sister and I would have argued about who saw the preserved sunken canoe first. By that time, in the late 1960s, the wide, flat spring bowl at Silver Springs no longer hosted Hollywood movies. Which is just as well, as my Christian fundamentalist parents would have approved neither of the Creature from the Black Lagoon (devilish) nor of Tarzan (loud, not enough clothes).
At Weeki Wachee, I open my car door to let some air in and lean back in the seat. I imagine my parents visiting a spring that features mermaids in bikini tops and skin-tight fish bottoms, mouthing air pipes and eating bananas underwater. Um, no.
But I’m getting ahead of myself again.
At the admissions booth, the attendant leans forward, her eyes searching the air beside and behind me, and drawls, “Just you?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I reply, reflexively shifting into Southern, even though I’ve lived in New England for more than thirty years and—since she’s slightly younger than I am—the “ma’am” is technically not required. “Just me.”
“Well, all right, then,” she says, obviously puzzled at the sight of a lone (female) tourist, but she recovers. “Enjoy beautiful Weeki Wachee.”
Weeki Wachee is world-famous for its mermaids, but it is also one of Florida’s premier first magnitude freshwater springs, part of a pearl-necklace cluster of first magnitudes about 45 miles north of Tampa. “Magnitude” refers to how much water the spring produces. I’m guessing most people think of salt/ocean water when they think of Florida, but I always think of freshwater springs, because Florida is mostly water, even the land part. Underneath a thin layer of topsoil (don’t think about this too much) is limestone, the remains of zillions of tiny shellfish, deposited over eons, when all of what is now the Florida peninsula lay under a vast warm ocean. What holds the limestone up, at least most of the time: groundwater, much of which is the Floridan Aquifer. Springs occur when the aquifer rises closer to the surface and erodes the limestone separating the aquifer and the surface, known in real time as a sink, or sinkhole. Over vast stretches of time (geology being the original “slow” movement), the water seeps up, and the chemical reaction between air and water and limestone eventually carves out the spring bowl and creates the web of underwater caves that spider from it. The water from the aquifer travels up into the spring bowl, collects, and then—because water loves to travel—flows elsewhere, following the contours of local geography. Many of Florida’s freshwater springs eventually flow to the Atlantic Ocean to the east or the Gulf of Mexico to the west.
Weeki Wachee’s spring bowl is 30 feet deep, 55 feet wide, and 200+ feet long. Its water production is staggering: about 117 million gallons per day. To hold all that water in one place, you’d need a 300-foot-long pool (think football field) that’s 50 feet wide and 10 feet deep—and then you’d need to build 116 more of them. Every day. The underwater complex of limestone caves surrounding Weeki Wachee’s main spring extends for nearly 7,000 feet, the same length as twenty-eight 747 jumbo jets.
Beyond Weeki Wachee’s spring bowl, the water flows into a wide, sandy basin, which has been made into a half-acre-wide beach and recreation area. At the western edge of the basin, the flow narrows again to a twenty-foot-wide channel. The vegetation—bald cypress, pine, sweetgum, magnolia, myrtle, bay—thickens on the banks. Clumps of pondweed and eel grass sway under the water, which is so clear I can see all the way to the sandy bottom. Sunfish, bluegill, shiners, and bass dart among clumps of underwater vegetation. This is the landscape of my childhood—water surrounded by fragrant, thick scrub. Although I’ve lived “away” for years,
I feel an internal shift, a relaxing of a tension that I didn’t even know I had. These sights and smells are what my body knows as home.
There are differences, of course. A bald eagle perches on a jagged bald cypress limb jutting over the river. When I was growing up, DDT had nearly wiped them out. And there’s a manatee—no more than 10 feet from the kayak I’ve rented to paddle slowly down the river. The steadily warming climate means that manatees (also alligators, iguanas, and armadillos) now occupy areas in Florida that were too chilly for them when I was a kid. I worry about the future of my home state—the warming has plenty of ill effects like bigger, badder hurricanes—but I can’t stop marveling when a manatee surfaces a few feet away, then gracefully tucks everything but the tip of her broad tail under a vegetation mat until my kayak passes by. About eight miles from the main spring, the channel, now the Weeki Wachee River—cypress-tannin water stained the color of well-steeped tea—flows gently into the Gulf of Mexico.
During my drive to the park, I had several conversations with myself, on the topic “What about the mermaids?” I promised myself that I’d ignore the silly mermaids and focus on the spring. That was my research, after all.
I turn in my kayak, retrace my steps around the beach and spring bowl, celebrating some good field notes and a couple of stunning pictures. As I head toward the parking lot, I pass the building that houses the mermaid show. And I begin to waver a little. I duck under the awning that normally shades the lines of people waiting for the next production. There are no lines today, since it’s the off-season, but I note the next show time. An hour and a half.
Most sources agree that Weeki Wachee comes from the Seminole language, although the people now called Seminoles originated in the vast Creek nation that lived well north of here, in Georgia and Alabama and northern Florida. They moved south for various reasons, the most urgent of which was to seek new land and to avoid the spreading English settlements and the combative settlers who populated them. None of the sources agrees whether the native name Weeki Wachee means “little spring” (which it’s not) or “winding river” (which the river is, if you use your imagination a little). “Chee” in the Creek language means “water.” I remember my father telling me this when I was 7 or 8 and how, after that, I scrutinized the signs marking the waterways we regularly crossed: Choctawhatchee, Chattahoochee. The highway signs included both the original “chee” plus the word “creek” or “river.” I annoyed the entire family more than once by announcing, as we passed over each bridge, that we were passing the such-and-such Water Creek. I’m not sure why, but I felt strongly that someone needed to point out the redundancy.
Weeki Wachee’s history parallels that of many of Florida’s freshwater springs. Over time archeologists have uncovered the names, they think, of some of the native groups who lived near the springs: Ais, Apalachee, Calusa, Timucua, and Tocobago. In the 1500s, the Spanish arrived, looking for gold. (Hernando County is named for Hernando de Soto, who likely never made it this far south on Florida’s west coast, though he caused plenty of trouble in other places.) Following close on the Spaniards’ heels were English explorers, followed by a wave of mostly English settlers, followed by slaves escaping plantations and natives fleeing forced relocation, followed by more white settlers seeking cheap land, followed, particularly after WWI, by that unique breed of settler known as the tourist.
Newton Perry, the man who developed Weeki Wachee as a tourist attraction, claimed that he’d had the mermaid “vision” as soon as he saw the spring. Clearly, the man was gifted with a vigorous imagination: When he purchased the spring and surrounding land in 1946, pre-world famous Weeki Wachee featured a narrow road running about 100 yards from and parallel to the spring but no amenities, not even a grocery store or a gas station. The town, if you could call it that, was populated mostly by alligators, bears, skunks, rattlesnakes, and mosquitoes.
Pre-Weeki Wachee project, Perry was a US Navy diver, so he knew his way around underwater construction and oxygen tanks. Even though no one seems quite sure why he fixed his sights on mermaids, they do agree that his approach was skilled and single-minded. His first order of business: clearing the head spring basin of years’ worth of accumulated trash. The settlers who lived in the area used the basin as a landfill. Heavy items dumped into the spring bowl quickly and conveniently settled deep in the basin; lighter items were tumbled downstream by the steady five miles per hour current that flows out of the spring vent.
On this, I’m willing to give Perry a little credit. Before he turned the spring into a home for thespian mermaids, he removed tons of debris from the spring bowl, including washing machines and chunks of old cars. He kept people from filling it back up again, which did not always meet with local approval. He also performed some impressive engineering to anchor a massive underwater stage onto the lip of the limestone bowl—without destroying it.
At many other first-magnitude springs, the Florida parks department has moved toward simplification, peeling away the layers of exclamation-point attractions that began with the post World War II tourist boom and continued into the late twentieth century. Weeki Wachee, too, moved from private to public ownership, becoming a state park in 2008. You can see the results of these efforts: paths along the river’s edge, naturalist talks, and native reptile exhibits. Even so, the decidedly non-native Weeki Wachee mermaids remained.
After setting up his underwater stage in the 1940s, Perry started looking for talent. He hired young, attractive female swimmers from around the world. He taught them how to sip air through a tube and (yes) eat bananas underwater, all while performing intricate tumbles and turns, their long legs encased in a skintight mermaid tail, their breasts covered by bikini tops that glittered with giant sequined scales. Weeki Wachee wasn’t just popular—it was a sensation. Female swimmers traveled across the country to audition. Tourists came in droves. The mermaid show ran daily, three to five times a day, depending on the time of year. More than a dozen movies were filmed here, ranging from a brief documentary on diving techniques to rom coms about mistaken identities and (you knew this would happen) someone visiting the park and falling in love with a mermaid. The earliest film was 1948; the most recent, 2016 (a “third generation” mermaid wants nothing more than to escape the confines of Weeki Wachee). As Perry grew his mermaid empire, he added a gift shop and a pavilion where tourists could have their picture taken with a “real live” mermaid.
The number of residents in the official town of Weeki Wachee: between four and ten, depending on the source consulted.
The number of mermaids performing in the park at any one time: about three dozen.
Except for my quick detour to check show times, I’ve deliberately avoided the park center, except to use the restroom. I can’t help wondering what this place would look like without the mermaid pavilion. As always, when I’m around a spring, I’m enchanted—there’s no other word for it—by the clear water, the way the tiny chips of limestone at the bottom of the bowl sparkle in the sun. Together they create an optical illusion that the water is shallow—only a foot or two. Reality: The water is so clear, and the reflections so bright, water that appears to be two feet deep is often fifteen or twenty.
At the same time, I’ve heard about the Weeki Wachee mermaids my whole life and— let’s face it—if my parents had ever deigned to visit, I would have been the kid putting my bony elbows out to claim my place in line in front of my sister, happily enduring the sweat and the gnats and the general misery that is Florida outdoors in the summer. After all, a vacation, even a lousy one, was better than weeding the garden or shelling bushels of butterbeans or shucking hundreds of ears of corn, or going to long, hot summer evening Gospel revivals and sings, which was what we otherwise did in the summer. As the spring geography tugs at my heart, my emotions move between ambivalence and guilt. My family—Floridians going back six or more generations—prides itself on knowing and loving what people today call the “real Florida”—a geological and biological wonder, its original lower half a “sea of grass” and its upper half thick with longleaf pine and lush scrub too dense to walk through. For me, sleepy towns and jewel water springs are the real Florida. Painted-up sprawls like Miami are not. Camping and swimming and fishing—that’s what real Floridians do. Not that my parents were purists about tourists: They weren’t above enjoying a good spot, if they considered it reasonably wholesome. They took me and my sister to the Peanut Festival and the Bonifay Rodeo and the Rattlesnake Rodeo without hesitation; well, moderate hesitation on that last one.
I edge closer to the center of the park, the tourist part, with the playground and the mermaid/merman photo cutouts (your picture here!) and the restaurants (chicken fingers at Pirate’s Grubb!) and the gift shop. “I’ve come this far,” I tell myself, at the door of the gift shop, “No idea when I might be able to travel here again.” Even though my mind is perfectly clear that no one at my house wants fake key lime honey or a manatee-shaped tea infuser that looks like a turd with whiskers, I pick up the honey in the gift shop, then a T-shirt. I put the T-shirt back. Here’s the truth: I’m here. I want to see the damn mermaids.
The mermaid stand next to the gift shop is bare bones: a plywood awning decorated with blue scrollwork meant to imitate ocean waves, with a wide seat for the mermaid. A sign notes the times the mermaid will be present, which seem to fall between the times noted for the main mermaid shows. A brochure from the gift shop reveals that mermaids sometimes emerge from the watery deep to greet humans living “above.” Said above-landers can return the mermaid’s greeting (assuming they possess a $15 gift shop receipt), and they can stand next to her for an official photo, to show their friends back home that mermaids really do exist. Above-landers like me who refuse to pay the fee can watch this interaction, but they can’t use flash photography, and they can’t get closer than fifty feet.
Since it’s October, I see no lines forming for photos with the real, live mermaid, so I pop back inside the gift shop for a drink of water. When I return, the mermaid has appeared. She is young—around twenty—with a sheath of thick, blond hair pulled to one side so that it cascades over her bare shoulder. She is leaning on her side, elbow underneath, wide tail fanned across the platform. She is slender, and I wonder if she is uncomfortable, with hip bones pressing into the plywood. But if anything hurts, she doesn’t let on. She smiles, wiggles her fluke just a little, beckons a small, shy girl to come closer. The girl does, after a little more fluke waving from the mermaid and a couple of pokes between the shoulder blades from the girl’s mother.
And, yeah, ok—for a moment—I think about dashing inside and paying $15 so I can get my picture taken with the mermaid. I would have to make a silly face, of course, just to show anyone who looked at the picture that I wasn’t serious about any of this. But I don’t. I squelch my “let’s meet a mermaid” thoughts by trying to figure out how she got onto the platform. I didn’t see her come up, and I’m curious how she’ll return “down below,” wherever that is. The mermaid stand doesn’t have a solid roof, so there’s no place to put a winch to lower her. The platform looks all of a piece; I don’t see a trap door underneath the platform. Maybe she hopped. Or she was carried by mermaid-transport logistics staff. You don’t need to be an engineer to know that no one can walk on that tail.
So, I wait. And wait. And wait some more. The time for the next mermaid show creeps closer. I check the auditorium’s digital countdown-to-showtime display. More people file from the gift shop, receipts in hand, to get their picture taken with the mermaid. She never stops smiling. She never stops waggling her tail, which must be like doing abdominal side-crunches for 40 minutes nonstop. She never really makes eye contact, either. Nor does she touch any of the children who stand next to her for the photo. Instead, she curves her arm behind them, maintaining a careful distance between her arm and their shoulders. The snapshot, which they will take home in a small, cheap frame that says WORLD FAMOUS WEEKI WACHEE MERMAIDS, will look as if she’s giving them a hug.
A few minutes before the show is scheduled to start, I give up. Clearly I’ve miscalculated; this is a spare mermaid, not one who is going to be in the show. They would need to shrug into their tails (like a wet swimsuit?) or rehearse the required mermaid moves (side fluke, check). I should have thought of that. I walk toward the auditorium and thread my way through the labyrinth of ropes leading to the auditorium entrance. Before I go in, I turn around. Maybe, just maybe, I’ll be able to see her hop or glide or be carried off the platform. The platform is empty. The mermaid has gone back below.
Still, I look for her during the show in the cavernous, slightly damp amphitheater that is actually under the water, almost level with the bottom of the spring bowl, another of Newton Perry’s underwater engineering feats. In a significantly condensed version of The Little Mermaid that I hope is at least partly ironic, the mermaids perform intricate loops around Ariel, who does fall in love with the prince (no tail, just astoundingly tight spandex), and the two articulate their true love with a lot of flipping and fluking, pausing occasionally to sip on their air pipes, like they’re hanging out in an underwater hookah lounge. Wicked witch Ursula’s every entrance onto the underwater scene is accompanied by a clap of manufactured thunder that makes most kids and not a few adults screech and duck for cover. At the end, the actors—four brunettes and a redhead—take a bow, or as much of a bow as one can take while trying to keep head up and tail down, no mean feat given the body’s natural buoyancy. I figure the mermaids must be aided by some kind of weight belt, but I sure can’t spot them.
In the popular Disney version of the tale, Ariel’s request for human legs is granted, and she joins her prince to live “above” the remainder of her life. I don’t remember the exact ending of the Weeki Wachee version of Little Mermaid; after round four of covering my ears to avoid Ursula’s thunder, I lose track of the narration, then get distracted looking at the contours of the spring bowl, and then at the infrastructure bolted into it. I start looking for the connectors for the air pipes, and then I move on to wondering what would happen if the glass wall between me and the 117 million gallons of water gave way.
I decide to move closer to the exit. I never see the blond mermaid who was on the platform.
The show ends, the lights go down. The prince swims away first, disappearing into what looks like a deep crevice in the limestone. The remaining mermaids swim backward, to the edge of the wings of the underwater stage. They pause, then let go of the air pipes, which bubble and snake down to the spring bowl floor. The mermaids hover for a few more seconds and then, tails first, they disappear.
Beth Richards’ work has appeared in Fourth Genre (Editor’s Prize), Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices, Talking Writing, The Sun (Readers Write), and the Cincinnati Review (Schiff Prize); in three anthologies: Coming Out in the South, Into Sanity, and The Masters Review; and in Michael Steinberg’s blog (#84, “Stories and Stars”). Richards earned an MFA from the Solstice MFA in Creative Writing Program at Lasell University.